A Christmas Tale (2008)

In Ireland, American lawyer Ingrid Jessner and her activist partner, Paul Sullivan, struggle to uncover atrocities committed by the British government against the Northern Irish during the "Troubles." But when Sullivan is assassinated in the streets, Jessner teams up with Peter Kerrigan, a British investigator acting against the will of his own government, and struggles to uncover a conspiracy that may even implicate one of Kerrigan's colleagues.

A star is born in a time of both celebration and instability in this historical drama with music from director Christophe Barratier. In the spring of 1936, Paris is in a state of uncertainty; while the rise of the Third Reich in Germany worries many, a leftist union-oriented candidate, Léon Blum, has been voted into power, and organized labor is feeling its new power by standing up to management.

Weimar, 1921. The life of 20-year-old Lotte Brendel seems to be predetermined. Her father sees her as a future wife and mother on the side of a man who is to take over the parental carpentry business. But the idiosyncratic Lotte joins a group of young artists against the will of her family, applies at the Bauhaus and is accepted. The Weimar Bauhaus, under the direction of the visionary Walter Gropius, aspires not only to combine arts and crafts, but also to find the place for the "New Man". In the student Paul Seligmann Lotte finds a supporter and her great love.

Shortly before her wedding, art gallery director Nora travels from Paris to Grenoble to visit her preteen son, Elias, who is spending time with her aging professor father, Louis, recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. During her stay, she reaches out to her former lover, Ismaël, a viola player and father figure to Elias who has been committed against his will to a mental hospital. Ismaël, however, has his own problems to sort out.

Alice invites her past two lovers and her current to Christmas dinner uniting them all in her house. In sentimental flashbacks she recalls the former times with each of them. While she reminisces, she also fixates on a new relationship that blooms and dies within the same calendar year leaving her to wonder if she's meant to be with anyone for any extended time.

Neglected by her husband during the pre-Christmas rush, Mrs. Claus takes the reindeer and sleigh out for a drive, only to end up stranded in the neighborhood of Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Ana, an eight-year-old girl living in Madrid with her grandmother and two sisters, mourns the death of her mother.

A washed-up Marseilles cop (Auteuil) earns a chance at redemption by protecting a woman from the man who killed her parents as he is about to be released from prison.

Writer Paul Benjamin is nearly hit by a bus when he leaves Auggie Wren's smoke shop. Stranger Rashid Cole saves his life, and soon middle-aged Paul tells homeless Rashid that he wouldn't mind a short-term housemate. Still grieving over his wife's murder, Paul is moved by both Rashid's quest to reconnect with his father and Auggie's discovery that a woman who might be his daughter is about to give birth.

Cairo, 2011. A police officer investigates the murder of a woman in a luxurious hotel in the days leading up to the Egyptian revolution.